Saturday, January 5, 2013

So Charlie may have mentioned that some of you felt a bit left out because you didn't know I was going to Africa. I know I mentioned it to some of you, though it has been a long time since I brought it up. But to be perfectly honest, I was not thinking about this at all until maybe two weeks ago when I realized that I was way behind in procuring things for the trip.

Originally I was supposed to go to Ghana with Dr. Mauger. Then things got all confused, and now I am going to Ethiopia with Dr. Tandon, one of our cataract attendings, and Adam Cloud, our glaucoma, soon-to-be cornea fellow. OSU is in the process of setting up an exchange program with the major teaching hospital in Ethiopia, which is located on Gondar. They are doing mostly small-incision extracap cataract surgery (what most of the developing world is doing), but they recently got a phaco machine, but they have no idea how to use it. Phaco is what most of the developed world is doing for cataract surgery.

So, we are going to go there to teach them phaco, and they are going to hopefully teach me how to do small incision extracaps.

I'm acutally more excited about Ethiopia, because the doctor's I'm going with are a lot more fun. I will have hot water and indoor plumbing, and because as Lonely Planet puts it, it is "the Camelot of Africa".

There are lots of big Christian Churches, monasteries, and castles from the middle ages, believe it or not, and a huge Italian ex-pat community.

Dr. Mauger went there a few weeks ago and said it was a very nice place, and very safe. I'm pretty excited:)

It's about two people renting farmland in the mountains in Vermont. I want to go live there sometimes, in a romantical sort of way.

But then you read the blog posts about how the two of them can never go on vacation together because one of them always has to tend to the farm, and your fairytale ends. Because let's be honest, this girl L-O-V-E-S to travel. There is another blog post on that, coming soon.

But either way her pictures are beautiful, and it is a breath of fresh air to see someone young going into farming for all the right reasons.